


rogue waves

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, M/M, Mid-Season, Non-Consensual Touching, Other, Possession, where's quentin's head at these days? nowhere good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 06:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19865248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “It’s me, it’s Eliot,” the Monster says, and Quentin almost laughs in its face.“That trick was only ever going to work once,” he tells it, as gently as he can, and the Monster splits Eliot’s face with a grin.“That’s what you always say,” it says, gleeful, “but I can feel you believe it every time.”or: the Monster likes to play games.





	rogue waves

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this almost two months ago after seeing some version of [this scene](https://leguin.tumblr.com/post/186387777141/eliotsvests-official-mermaid-itsallaces) from 4x05 and realizing that Quentin's disbelief that Eliot is really there must mean the Monster has pretended to be Eliot at least once. Probably more times than that. 
> 
> This is sort of a bookend to [absolute lithops effect](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19337551), in that I think both are a fun ('fun') way to recontextualize the season. 
> 
> Warnings: non-consensual touching, casual murder, references to torture, ongoing trauma, depression. The Monster is the Monster.
> 
> Epigraph from the wikipedia article on rogue waves.

  
“Rogue waves are unusually large, unexpected, and suddenly appearing surface waves that can be extremely dangerous…[they] present considerable danger for several reasons: they are rare, unpredictable, may appear suddenly or without warning, and can impact with tremendous force.”

  
—  
  
The light that filters through the wide windows of the apartment is thin and halfhearted. Quentin isn’t sure if it’s the time of year, the time of day, or just the pale faux-wood furnishings that make the place look so washed out by the afternoon sun. He hasn’t been here long enough to tell.  
  
He’s not even sure whose apartment it is. One minute he’d been Brian, terrified, useless Brian, and then he’d been himself again, covered in blood and scalp itchy in a way that tells him the Monster hadn’t let Brian take a shower in a long time. Maybe it’s the way the light had filtered through the woods he’d come back to himself in, hazy and gold, that makes everything here feel like a simulacrum.  
  
Well. Not everything. Quentin has only been himself again for a few hours, and those hours already feel realer than the months he spent as Brian. The part of him that has had to come back to himself after so long away time and time again says this is a good thing, but the rest of him misses being Brian. Brian had been all alone and had no sense of responsibility to anyone, not by the end. Brian had no feelings about the body that the Monster was using - even the initial frisson of attraction had been ground down months ago. Brian had run on one simple thought, by the end: just let it all stop.  
  
Quentin doesn’t feel like that. He can’t. He sits on the couch in this unfamiliar apartment, watching the Monster sprawl in its chair and stare out the window into the city, and he tries to figure out how to fix everything.  
  
Now that he’s himself again, he realizes just how precarious his existence has been the last few months, and likewise for Eliot’s existence. Jesus, _Eliot_. Quentin wants to be furious at him, all the emotions he felt at Blackspire sitting heavy and unprocessed in his chest, but Eliot’s not there to be mad at. Not right now. Not yet. Not yet.  
  
“I’m bored,” the Monster announces, a proclamation that makes Quentin freeze before he can think about it. It’s a trained reaction. There are four human reactions to danger, a therapist had once told him: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Brian had tried them all, in time. Only two had ever worked on the Monster with any kind of reliability.  
  
“Do you want something to eat?” he tries, and the Monster looks at him, head tilting to the side.  
  
“Something to eat,” it repeats, almost absently. “No, Quentin.”  
  
“What about a card trick?” he asks, desperate to keep its attention away from the bedrooms, where everyone else is coming up with some kind of plan. (Julia had looked at the blood spattered across his face, worried, and he’d tried a rusty smile. _Don’t worry, I can distract it_.) “I can do a lot more now that I know about magic again.”  
  
The Monster mouths the words ‘magic again’, and just keeps looking at him. He looks back for as long as he can stand, then shifts his gaze up a millimeter, at its forehead. If he looks too long into its eyes, sometimes he thinks -  
  
“Q?”  
  
He jerks his gaze back down. At first he thinks it’s his imagination, but this time he sees it happen:  
  
“Q,” the…someone says, sounding ragged, relieved, and he moves to the edge of the couch, breathless.  
  
“It’s me, it’s Eliot,” they say, and he’s standing up and walking over, months of pain at the Monster’s hands be damned.  
  
“Eliot,” he breathes, and Eliot reaches a hand up and touches Quentin’s cheek with clammy, trembling fingers, and it’s the best thing Quentin can ever remember feeling.  
  
“It’s me,” Eliot repeats, like he’s savoring the words. “It’s me. El-i-ot.”  
  
Quentin realizes too slowly. He doesn’t move away quickly enough (he was never going to move away quickly enough).  
  
“Q,” the Monster says mockingly, fingernails digging into his cheek. A sprung trap.  
  
“It’s me, your friend,” it sneers, and Quentin feels his breath coming fast and slight, his chest rising and falling like that’s all it knows to do.  
  
He freezes.  
  
Afterwards, the Monster will be thrilled for all of a minute ( _that was a fun game, Quentin!_ ), but when Quentin refuses to meet its eyes, it becomes sullen again.  
  
—  
  
Quentin doesn’t know who keeps the kitchen in the apartment stocked, but he’s eternally grateful to them. Food is the most reliable way to distract the Monster, most days, and sometimes that distraction even nets Quentin a few minutes alone. He gets to collapse onto the couch and sink in on himself until the Monster wanders back out with a bag of something in its hands. It’s almost restful, except for all the ways that it isn’t.  
  
On this particular day, which could be any day, any month, really, he lost track of that shit a while ago, he’s feeling even more exhausted than usual. They’d started searching for the Monster’s stones a few days back, and while it’s felt good (for a given value of good) to have a concrete goal, it means that the Monster has stayed at his side even more so than usual.  
  
He’s so tired today that he curls up on the couch immediately, before the Monster even leaves the room to go to rifle through the cabinets. It’s his lack of defense, maybe, that makes it pause and ask almost hesitantly, “Quentin, do you want something to eat. Also.”  
  
“No, thank you,” he tells it softly. He hasn’t been this exhausted since, fuck. Since Alice had died, years ago. Since he’d been haunted at every waking moment by her niffin, furious, vengeful, and wearing down his body a little more every day.  
  
Minutes must pass as he lays there, looking at the floor and not seeing it, because suddenly the Monster is coming back in. He checks its hands out of habit, notes at first glance that it’s nothing dangerous ( _you can’t drink antifreeze!_ ). Notes at second glance that it’s - a peach. That the Monster is holding, with one of Eliot’s elegant hands, a peach.  
  
It takes a bite as Quentin watches. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, doesn’t dare to think what he’s hoping. The Monster chews on the bitten-off piece slowly, swallows, and lets out a breath.  
  
(The throne room had smelled like incense and blood, but the smell of the peaches had cut through it, sweet and familiar. The peach, in Eliot’s hand -)  
  
“Quentin Coldwater,” it says, quiet and thoughtful. Considering.  
  
Quentin can’t breathe. He can’t. He just watches.  
  
“Quentin,” it says again, and he can _hear_ \- fuck. No. He doesn’t, he won’t, not again. He looks away, back down at the floor.  
  
“Q,” the Monster wheedles, and then it crosses the floor in lurching strides, nothing like Eliot’s smooth gait.  
  
It sits next to him on the couch. He won’t look at it.  
  
Eventually, he hears a wet thud, and sees the peach splattered on the floor. It must’ve been ripe.  
  
“What _was_ that,” the Monster asks.  
  
“A peach,” he says. He can smell the juice, see Arielle’s hands carrying the basket, Eliot’s hands holding a little wood-handled knife and slicing a peach into pieces for Teddy.  
  
“I didn’t like it,” the Monster tells him. It snaps its fingers, and the peach is gone, just the splatter left. He watches the floor grow sticky as the juice dries, until the Monster demands his attention again.  
  
—  
  
It’s not always a deliberate trick, and sometimes - sometimes Quentin is the one who starts it. On the rare occasions that he sleeps in a bed, the Monster often joins him in the night. Out of curiosity, maybe. And so sometimes he wakes up in the dark, feels the long warm line of a familiar body next to him and reaches for it out of instinct. Tangles his fingers in a hand he knows intimately, or turns on his side to press his face against a shoulder, moves his arm, blindly, to lay across a chest, and then -  
  
He’s become very good at identifying all the things that made Eliot who he was. It’s the smell, usually, that brings him back to reality. The Monster smells all wrong, like blood and layers of dried sweat so thick it makes Julia gag, sometimes. But Quentin has known Eliot in so many ways, through so many lives, that sometimes he forgets that any version of Eliot could really be all wrong.  
  
What always does it is the expression on the Monster’s face. Baleful, almost. It watches Quentin _realize_ and jerk away in fear and self-disgust, and it looks angry, wide-eyed. Hurt.  
  
Sometimes the Monster moves away first.  
  
—  
  
“It’s me, it’s Eliot,” the Monster says, apropos of nothing.  
  
Quentin is two hundred pages into a thick tome entitled _The Secrets of the Elder Gods_ that so far has been almost complete bullshit. He can’t decide what would be more irritating to the Monster - if he ignored it, or if he looked up and stopped researching.  
  
He looks up, and sees its usual expression of boredom and imperious demand. It’s barely even trying. Quentin feels a sudden urge to laugh in its face. He thinks about how they’re getting closer, how they’ve found two of the stones already, and keeps his expression neutral.  
  
“That trick was only ever going to work once,” he tells it, as gently as he can manage.  
  
The Monster splits Eliot’s face open with a grin.  
  
“That’s what you always say,” it says, gleeful, “but I can feel you believe it every time.”  
  
Quentin just shakes his head, goes back to the book. Notes, absently, that the Monster has gotten better at saying Eliot’s name.  
  
—  
  
In a garage filled with the wreckage of his dad’s planes and his mother’s expectations, the Monster puts a hand on his shoulder and tells him that Eliot is dead.  
  
In the aftershock of those words, blinding light and incomprehensible noise filling his senses, he feels a flash of sick relief. He blames Brian for it because he can, because it’s easier to think that he’s just feeling the echo of Brian’s desperate desire to lay down and die and not have anything matter anymore. Quick on the heels of the relief, _Brian’s_ relief, is Quentin’s anger. All those fucking games that the Monster has played with him, from the pretending to the lying - why not tell him Eliot was dead and be done with it? Why not? Why put him through-  
  
But he’s too tired to keep that up for long. The Monster takes them to a diner and orders burgers. Quentin watches Eliot’s long fingers steal fries from his plate like a friend, a lover, a companion in some timeline they never lived. A life where Quentin had someone at his side to help pack away the belongings of a dead loved one. A life where he and Eliot got to be happy and hurt in all the normal ways.  
  
The Monster nudges his feet with one of its own under the diner table. He thinks it’s just trying to be irritating, at first, and then he glances to his right and sees some high school-aged couple playing footsie under their table. The anger returns like an episodic wave; he digs his fingers into his leg to try and keep from shouting: footsie? Footsie? You killed my -  
  
But he’s tired. So very, very tired. Fight, flight, fawn, freeze. He plays dead. His feet stay where they are. The Monster chews on a fry and watches him with dark eyes.  
  
—  
  
Eliot being dead changes things. Quentin doesn’t have to care about - about appeasing the Monster. About protecting what has been, all along, the corpse of a man he cares about in ways he doesn’t know how to explain. His mind spins and whirls with just a single thought.  
  
It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.  
  
_It_ being a helpful umbrella term that lets him think that one simple, repetitive thought as he goes back to the apartment. He bleeds a stone with magic, an annoying little spell, over and over, and thinks that it doesn’t matter. Alice comes into the apartment, and why not, really, helps him bleed the stone better than he ever could, she always was the better magician, and it doesn’t matter.  
  
He doesn’t have to do anything to prepare himself to kill Eliot’s body. He was hollow at the start of this, and he’s hollower now. He watches the Monster approach, shockingly pale in the high noon sun. Even after months and months, it still doesn’t know how to make Eliot’s body move beautifully or efficiently. It stumbles and lurches more than usual, comes towards him with wide eyes, says,  
  
“Q! It’s me. It’s Eliot.”  
  
“No, bullshit,” he tells it. Smiles a little, because it doesn’t matter.  
  
What does matter is getting the Monster to his side, getting its back to Alice so she can throw the blood on it.  
  
The Monster looks at him. He stares back.  
  
“Just come on,” he says, waving it over. Wanting it to be over. Wanting to move past this last little cruelty, the Monster’s final game.  
  
The Monster is still looking at him, intent on something.  
  
“Fifty years,” it says.  
  
( _Fifty years_.)  
  
“Who gets that kind of proof of concept?”  
  
( _Who gets proof of concept like that?_ )  
  
“What,” he says. That one simple thought is stuttering in his mind. It doesn’t - m-  
  
“Peaches and plums, motherfucker,” the Monster says.  
  
_Eliot_ says.  
  
“I’m alive in here.”  
  
He can’t. He’s heard it so many times. The Monster had been right, he’s never been able to keep himself from falling for it because he always wants it to be true. He can’t he can’t he can’t  
  
He can’t let Alice kill it. Not if there’s a chance.  
  
(Maybe not even if there isn’t a chance. Eliot’s beautiful, familiar body. His graceful hands. His smiling mouth. His smile.)  
  
Quentin throws himself between Alice and Eliot. Eliot - he - the Monster -  
  
The Monster vanishes.  
  
(Later, he’ll be torn between hope and disbelief. What does it matter that this performance is the first not meant for Quentin alone? What does it matter that the Monster has been so convincing, so many times before? His doubt inspires the same in Julia. The tiny, wavering flame of hope is barely enough to warm himself.)  
  
—  
  
The Monster watches its chosen psychic choke to death dispassionately. Quentin witnesses the scene and isn’t sure which one he’s closer to. The man jerking and shuttering, too weak to deal with this petulant god? Or the petulant god itself, who doesn’t quite know how to care about bodies, living or dead?  
  
He hates it. He hates it all. He feels powerless and alone, standing there in the kitchen with Julia and Penny 23. Every time the Monster kills he has to face up to what he’s done by helping it, by sparing it.  
  
White foam bubbles out of the man’s mouth. Quentin directs his thoughts to what must be, if it even exists, the most absent god in all the multiverses, and thinks, _I’m sorry_.  
  
It’s not enough. It could never begin to be enough.  
  
The Monster turns to him like it knows. It probably does. It stands up, crowds into what Quentin might’ve termed, long ago, ‘his space.’ Shushes him like a child.  
  
“You’re upset,” it says, one hand hovering centimeters from his chest. Eliot’s body runs hot with a god in it; he can feel that unnatural heat radiating from the palm of the hand that’s not quite touching him.  
  
“I’ll get this gross corpse out of your sight,” the Monster assures him, and he stays still. A smooth pond in the dead of winter, frozen over. Motionless. Doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look up. Doesn’t collapse into the hands waiting to clutch at him and say “please” and “just take it away, I don’t want to see it anymore.”  
  
(Is it worse if he just thinks it? Is it worse if everything he does is a betrayal of who he thought he was?)  
  
And then the Monster changes its mind. It puts one hand on the body and one hand on Q’s arm and suddenly they’re all gone, Quentin and the Monster and a corpse dribbling fluids into the space between places.  
  
The Monster takes them to a dock. It’s dark out, wherever they are, and rain is coming down in misery-inducing sheets. The Monster glances at the body and says, “I’ll find some rocks,” and then it’s gone again. Quentin stares out at the churning sea and thinks wouldn’t it be funny if the police came right now? What would happen if they did? How long would the Monster look for him, if it came back and he was gone?  
  
A long time. Brian and the Monster played this game for months, and so Quentin knows the answer deep in his muscles and perfectly-healed bones. A long, long time.  
  
He stands there on the dock for ages, until the water has soaked completely through clothes he’s been wearing for - awhile. He doesn’t know. At least that takes care of needing a shower, he thinks, and the resulting laugh that tears out of his throat is borderline hysterical, and if anyone, anyone at all was around they’d know that something was - that he isn’t -  
  
The Monster reappears, and a hail of stones falls around it, some smashing right through the dock entirely. Quentin doesn’t flinch.  
  
“We have to sink the body, Quentin,” it tells him, and he nods stiffly. He moves the - he helps - the psychic’s shirt is wet, too, and his arms are very cold, and Quentin helps to pick him up and -  
  
The water crashes up through a jagged hole in the docks and splashes his left foot, soaking through his sock in an instant. The rocks are gone. The body is gone. The Monster is standing a few feet away and watching him, head tilted, expression incomprehensible.  
  
“Quentin,” the Monster says, and he can barely hear its voice over the waves. “Quentin, your face is wet.”  
  
“It’s raining,” he says, “that happens.”  
  
And then the Monster is in front of him, wiping water off of his cheeks with broad swipes of its thumbs. His face is cradled between two large hands, and the delicate movements of the Monster’s fingers are unfamiliar and yet not. He knows them.  
  
It’s so stupid, but he’s cold and wet and he’s just been an accomplice to yet another murder, and he looks at the bare skin visible above the Monster’s stupid t-shirt and below the untidy scruff that Eliot would never have allowed himself to grow, and he thinks - he opens his mouth and feels the fingers sliding against his cheekbones and the question escapes his throat like a bird desperately pushing up from the ground with graceless wings.  
  
“El?”  
  
He can’t see the Monster. He can’t. He refuses. He closes his eyes and just lets himself feel, for a moment, like it’s over. He just wants it to be over.  
  
“Q,” Eliot’s voice says, low and thoughtful, and if he keeps his eyes closed he can pretend that those are Eliot’s hands touching him with so much care. Like he was something found in a thrift shop with ‘fragile’ and ‘delicate’ stamped on him, and Eliot took him home to cherish. Like he’s loved. Like he’s not alone.  
  
The rain is still falling, and he’s getting colder, but Eliot’s hands are a fervent counterpoint to the chill. He doesn’t protest when one of them slides to the back of his neck. Doesn’t move away when the other drops to his back and he’s pulled in, flush against Eliot’s chest. For a moment, he’s almost warm. The hands on his body feel almost right.  
  
Eventually the hands push him away, and that feels right too. He opens his eyes reluctantly and looks up at the Monster, who is smiling at him fondly.  
  
“Oh, Quentin,” it says, putting one hand on his chest, right over his heart. “You needed that.”  
  
He doesn’t know what to say. Then the Monster fixes its gaze on his chest with that strange, curious look and moves its hand to unbutton the top button on his shirt. He doesn’t move. The sound of the waves is very, very loud. It unbuttons another button. The pads of its fingers are hot and rough against his skin. He wants to close his eyes.  
  
“Yes,” he says, finally, not recognizing his own voice as it emerges from his mouth. “I needed that.”

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com)   
>  [dreamwidth](https://patrokla.dreamwidth.org/)


End file.
